From Threads to Thoughts: Knots, Loops & Layers of Data

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

— Steve Jobs

Up-skilling and self-learning are not just modern buzzwords; they are essential sustainable survival mechanisms for the evolving soul. In a rapidly shifting world, this is precisely what our hobbies are for; they serve as the testing grounds for small, curious learnings that eventually bridge the gap toward much bigger, universal understandings. When we dive deep into a personal craft while remaining open to the world's vast patterns, we create a rare space where specialization and generalization actually meet. We become specialized enough to master the microscopic details of a single thread, yet generalized enough to see how that thread mimics the grand architecture of the entire cosmos.

The human mind is a beautiful weaver, though we rarely pause to notice how the threads of our hobbies can mirror the very fabric of reality. For me, learning macramé became a surprisingly meaningful way to reconnect with my memory and motor skills. Since I tend to feel overwhelmed by the noise and unpredictability of roads and vehicles, driving has never felt like the most natural activity for me, so working with my hands offered a gentler way to keep learning and practicing.

During the COVID-19 period, I spent time designing macramé pieces that I managed to sell through social media, along with some embroidered hoops. Looking back, that difficult period helped me understand, in a very personal way, just how valuable skill-building can be, not simply for productivity, but for keeping the mind curious, engaged, and connected to the joy of making something with our own hands. More than anything, the experience taught me to appreciate the quiet art of creation, how something meaningful can emerge from paying attention to the smallest knot, while still keeping sight of the larger picture.

When we are forced to say "no" to the world, we often view these moments as rigid limitations, or "nots" that tie us down. Yet, this journey taught me that our conditions put a few knots which make us say no and decide the "nots" of our life. When we finally realize the "nots," we understand them and use them as knots to climb up the nots. By engaging the hands in precise, repetitive movements, crafting acts as a neurological anchor.

In a world filled with overwhelming external chaos, turning an inner “not” into a physical “knot” can give us something tangible to hold on to, something that helps us steady ourselves and gently rise above our limitations. When we pay attention to this simple act of creation, we begin to notice a deeper language beneath it. A symbolic one that humans have been expressing, in one form or another, since the beginning of time.

Tarot teaches me symbolism, and I believe symbolism is the first language of expression. Humans would have symbolically used a stick to represent one quantity of a baby, a resource, a cattle, or anything, and then that one stick became the symbol of 1 in the form of a digit. This innate human drive to find meaning in structure expands beautifully when we transition from macrame to crochet. Crochet teaches how one single loop can take a completely new form just with a needle and a wool; it is another level of beautification of the thread.

This makes me wonder; if everything in the universe appears to be woven together, could there also be planes of existence that are knitted or crocheted from a single thread or perhaps, in some form, already have been? It may sound like a playful intuitive leap, but it strangely echoes some of the questions explored at the frontiers of modern physics, where certain theories imagine reality at its deepest level as being built from tiny, vibrating filaments of energy, while other approaches explore space-time as something that may emerge from microscopic quantum structures.

To navigate a cosmos built this way, we must learn to perceive it in layers, much like an animator constructing a digital canvas. Digital Art taught me to think in layers and see how each element is so crucial. Meanwhile, a mandala spread across can compel a person to look at the larger design and not get confused in the details, helping them read in between the lines and connect the dots. This multidimensional view reveals that our daily reality is an accumulation of invisible layers; time, emotion, and history, stacked perfectly on top of each other. Even when numerology and astrology show the limitations of human psychology as well as destiny, or when sports teaches pure hard work, testing limits, and teamwork, they all make me look at a universe built with so many sections and layers of realities and actualities. By separating these layers, we stop getting lost in the immediate chaos of the foreground and begin to appreciate the grand design of the background.

Yet, the greatest illusion of our modern architecture lies in how we collect and interpret the numbers of the world. In data science, we face massive human data biases simply because people do not share their exact metrics; the raw, messy, and deeply personal human truths that cannot be extracted by automated algorithms or surveys. When these intimate, qualitative nuances are hidden, the metrics that do come out largely create a massive distortion. My own experience as a freeze-fawn on the road is the perfect example of this hidden metric that a machine can never truly understand. To a computer tracking vehicle data or public transit patterns, my lack of driving logs looks like a flat statistic; a zero, a missing point, or a limitation. The machine has absolutely no way to measure the quiet, intense biological safety wall my brain builds to protect me, nor can it log the profound wisdom it takes to consciously say "no" to a busy road because the algorithm sees a blank space, it assumes a deficit.

When humans withhold, suppress, or simply lack the language for their deepest emotional metrics, those unspoken variables do not enter the system. Algorithms then process what is visible, amplify the measurable, and produce what appears to be a significant result, while the most consequential data remains unrecorded. The numbers are not necessarily false; they are incomplete in a way that can make the whole picture look like something else.

This is one of life’s quietest tricks. It presents us with the visible equation, while allowing experience to reveal the variables we could not see. What first appears to be a large deviation, a missing pattern, or an unexpected outcome can eventually become a doorway into a more accurate understanding of reality. A society may appear, through its large data points, to be moving at a particular pace. However, beneath those figures are millions of individual survival strategies; adaptations, silences, compromises, acts of endurance, and individual humane ways of making life work. These are not missing variables. They are the hidden mathematics of being human.

The entire cosmic tapestry is digested and understood through the architecture of the human mind, fueled by the words we consume. There can be many guilty pleasures too, and reading is mine.

I consume words of quotes for breakfast, world-related topics, opinions and research for lunch, any fiction, art, poems, and music for snacks, and tarot guidance as affirmations for the night. I can almost read anything; any booklet, any manual, any magazine, anything that really catches my attention. Words are always knocking my skull from the inside, forcing me to make sense of things, and honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. AI challenges people who have learned the skill but haven’t yet grasped its essence. That essence comes from something deeper; intuition, context, and the ability to recognize symbolism beyond the information itself.

The journey from chalk to pencil, pencil to pen, pen to marker, marker to calculator, calculator to typewriter, typewriter to computer, and eventually to AI tells us something simple. The essence has not changed, only the tools have evolved. Evolution is the difference between where we began and how we continue to create.

The anxiety around technology may partly come from a society already saturated with information, yet not always equally nourished by intuition. At a certain point, more knowledge does not necessarily create more clarity; it can simply increase the saturation. The mind needs both the right architecture and the right information, yet most importantly, it also needs the intuition to recognise what matters, what connects, and what can be set aside. Without that balance, information can remain noise, however abundant it may be. What we call being stuck is sometimes not a lack of knowledge at all, but a saturation of it without enough intuition to transform it into understanding.

So, as the morning sun rises and as I consume my first quotes for breakfast, I leave you with this; do not let the rigid data of the world define your boundaries. Feed your mind its daily diet of wonder coated in faith, trust the intuitive architecture of your soul, and keep braiding your personal "nots" into the very knots you climb.

Until the next layer unfolds, it’s just me, my words, and my AI, weaving sentences till I die. Stay woven till the next twilight.

“Learning never exhausts the mind.”

— Leonardo da Vinci